


Things Floating Like the First Hundred Flakes of Snow

by A (mumblemutter)



Category: Strindberg and Helium
Genre: Gen, Interdimensional Travel, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:12:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblemutter/pseuds/A
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Strindberg and Helium in Europe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Floating Like the First Hundred Flakes of Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/gifts).



> Many thanks to leksa and cm for the hand-holding, and to Sineala for the prompt. Happiest of holidays to you!

There isn't much, Helium reflects, that could improve their current situation, except maybe a heavy rainfall, or a power outage. Their hotel room in Copenhagen is dimly-lit and musty and smells of disinfectant, and the duvet feels cold when she settles on the bed, careful not to get too close to Strindberg. He's been despondent all day, barely looking up from his perpetual scowl at nowhere in particular, and sat down heavily on the bed as soon as they entered the room. He hasn't moved since.

Helium tries for her most brilliant smile and inches closer, moving softly just above the faded white cotton until she settles down next to his thigh. When he doesn't swat at her she extends an arm to rest on his leg, the pink a stark contrast against the dark fabric.

"No matter how far we travel," Strindberg says quietly, "the memories will follow in the baggage car, Helium."

Helium slumps a bit. "Baggage!" she tries, stretching the vowels, but her heart isn't in it.

Strindberg falls asleep atop the blankets, moving fitfully, and Helium watches him until his breath evens out and his chest rises and falls in calm, measured waves. Then she, too, closes her eyes.

Helium likes taking pictures, even though holding the camera is difficult for her and Strindberg just grimaces when she tries to get him into the frame. She's taken to capturing their fellow tourists instead: people leafing through tourist guides, looking up at sights and monuments, squeezing as many attractions as possible into their precious vacation days.

Helium wants to point at them and tell Strindberg, look, they're doing what we should be doing, what I brought you here for. They're taking all this in, all these new things, and they're happy they're away from home. They're happy they're in this world.

Strindberg, away from his own dusky home, has been surprisingly unfazed by the sudden change of environment, which Helium attributes as much to his incessant preoccupation with himself as to the fact that the sudden presence of cars and mobile phones and daytime television can't really surprise a man who expects nothing but chaos and distress from the world around him anyway.

"Say cheese!" she calls out and Strindberg looks at her, startled into a pose of frozen discontentment. The Bucharest sky is an impossible shade of blue all around him.

"The fierce July heat broods over the city", he says, as Helium grapples with the camera. "Life is intolerable, and everything is malodorous."

"Cheese," he adds after an agonized pause.

It doesn't really make much of a difference.

They go to a science museum in Munich and Strindberg seems, if not happy, at least content for the first time in weeks. He stalks from one room to the next, hands clasped behind his back, carefully reading the little placards, and after watching a number of other museum goers try out the interactive exhibits, goes to press some buttons himself. When they reach the electricity demonstrations, he stops in his tracks and stares at the cracks of lightning in front of him, wild and loud and almost close enough to touch, and doesn't move when Helium settles against his shoulder. The air feels prickly and strange against her skin.

"Science!" she sings as softly as she can manage, and Strindberg's face lights up for the briefest of moments.

A mere four or five hours later, the museum closes for the night and Strindberg immediately loses the slight spring in his step, moving once more as if reluctant to commit to forward motion. Their hotel is at the other end of town and Strindberg's hands are shaking a little when he opens the door to their room. "Now I know the full power of evil," he tells Helium. "It makes ugliness seem beautiful and goodness seem ugly and weak."

Helium does a little air flip. "Public transport!" she sings reassuringly, and floats up higher when Strindberg swats at her. Privately she thinks he might be exaggerating a bit.

They are in Pisa, but they might as well be in any of the other towns they've seen so far. There's a hotel room and there are people all around them and there are places to go and things to do and Strindberg is dressed all wrong and the food is never exactly to his liking.

"It is impossible to know where you are with women," Strindberg says as they narrowly avoid an oncoming moped. "Whatever you do is wrong."

He's still not over Berlin, then.

They get to the Leaning Tower and the first thing Helium takes in is the people milling about, posing with their hand held up, giggling at their friends, adjusting the angle of their arm when the person behind the camera tells them to. Some of them roll their eyes when they're done and turn to the next page in their guide books, mentally ticking off items on their list, some of them sit down on the grass together, resting, telling stories. It makes Helium's heart swell three sizes, all this _life_.

Strindberg peers at the tower with interest, then takes out a notebook and scribbles something into it. He started writing again in Helsinki, after Helium introduced him to motion pictures and they spent three consecutive days at the cinema. The one about the shared dreams he watched four times. Afterwards, he locked himself in their hotel room and didn't go out for another three days, only looking up from his notebooks whenever Helium put some food in front of him.

Helium doesn't know whether she should be happy about this, or worried. He's not drinking as much anymore, but he can still get drunk on ideas and knowledge and his own sense of mortality, and Helium doesn't quite know how to handle this Strindberg in her own world, here, where he's not supposed to sink into manic despair for months on end. Where there is so much brightness, so much to see.

He holds up the camera and looks at Helium, encouragingly. His fingers are black with ink and he didn't sleep all night.

Helium smiles for the camera.

It's almost autumn when they reach Paris, and Strindberg's mood has reached a new low. He's been writing more, and getting lost in his own head for hours on end, and some days Helium doesn't quite know how to reach him anymore.

He's working on another Diary, including an entire chapter about the incident in Berlin, and when they pass another young woman and Strindberg scowls after her like he had scowled after the last two dozen women, as if they had personally wronged him by passing him by on the streets, Helium floats right in front of his face, forcing him to slow down.

"Strindberg!" she says, angrily, but it's too high-pitched to come across right, and Strindberg just huffs and steps around her, not even bothering to see if she'll follow. She looks after him for a moment and then turns, floats in the other direction until she reaches the river.

She looks down into the Seine and then up to the sky. When she looks down again, the water and the sky are one. She could go anywhere, right now. A cloud drifts by, far above her. The shape reminds her of Strindberg's hair in the morning, just before he runs a comb through it, muttering to himself, and a sharp pang of regret tugs her down. She hadn't even been aware she was going up.

Strindberg finds her an hour later.

She's floating above a bench by the river, watching the people go by. She feels calmer now. He almost looks a little out of breath.

"Helium," he says, and she lets a breeze nudge her down toward him. It already faintly smells of the colder days to come.

"Helium!" she replies, stretching the vowels out even more than usual, reassuring.

"I'm tired, Helium," Strindberg says, and for once he looks up at her. The sun feels warm and soft against her skin, and the breeze moves her like in a dance. She could go anywhere. Strindberg reaches out his hand and Helium, after a moment, gently floats down until she almost touches his open palm. In silence you can't hide anything, Strindberg had told her once, but it hadn't made sense to her until now.

"Helium!" she repeats, and Strindberg nods at her, slowly.

They go home.

**Author's Note:**

> Title courtesy of [Wallace Stevens](http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20445), picture courtesy of [Creative Commons](http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickmayon/353280193/), Strindberg and Helium courtesy of [Strindberg and Helium](http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/), and most of the dialogue courtesy of the Real Strindberg, who had a lot of issues.


End file.
